excerpt from alejandra pizarnik’s diary

June 1, 1965 Buenos Aires

The open walls, the walls have been beaten, the cracks, the fissures, the holes who will close them up? This question, easy to formulate, is impossible to answer. The self in the form of the open slated shutters of a house in children’s stories. Those same shutters, closed, would form a green heart with small hearts which are crevices through which the air passes. But they cannot be closed. Or if they are closed, then something happens to the crevices, since the air doesn’t pass through them and the dwellers of the little house in the forest die asphyxiated. No. No one suffocates since they can’t be closed. Rather they’re injured, injured but not dead, although they would very much like to be dead; they are injured by the sharp wind. I don’t know if it’s because of the wind or because bandits have entered and injured them, stripped them of everything, and abandoned them to their bad luck. They dream of the green heart and of small hearts through which the air was coming. At the beginning it had to be like this. They were not going to be spared sorrows but those sorrows were going to be different from this one, so poor and so humiliating. It is not terrible to suffer but only to suffer for humiliating causes, since this robs all the beauty from the ceremony of suffering which, at first, didn’t differ from the other ceremonies.

the return of gil orlovitz

Rick Schober at Tough Poets Press continues his admirable efforts to introduce the work of Gil Orlovitz to a new contemporary audience. He previously raised funds via Kickstarter to publish a collection of Orlovitz’s stories, poems, and essays. With this latest campaign, he hopes to raise enough capital to reprint Orlovitz’s long out-of-print novel Ice Never F. As of this writing the project is over a third of the way funded, but it still needs support. [Update: Now fully backed and then some!] This book is virtually impossible to find on the used market, so Tough Poets Press is doing a valuable service to the many readers who in recent years have become interested in Orlovitz’s contributions to avant-garde writing in the 1960s. Now is your chance to be part of experimental literary history! Help fund the book’s publication and your name will appear in the Acknowledgments. More important than that, though, you will be assisting in the resurrection of a true American original writer.

the phantasmagoria of the mist

Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the splendour and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions; he hardly realised what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called might depart and return again.

Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

thoughtworm in the library of congress

I recently discovered that an issue of my old zine Thoughtworm is now held by the Library of Congress. Apparently, artist and writer Matt Dembicki, whose comics I dimly remember writing a review of long ago, donated his collection to the library in 2016, and Thoughtworm #11 was included in it. This issue has particular significance to me, as it was the first one I created a linocut for in order to print the covers. Linocut would become my cover design method of choice for the remaining issues of the zine. I also later had the linocut design, which depicts my favorite tree, the American Sycamore, tattooed on my left arm. I made a few extra prints of this one, too, and distributed them to friends. While Thoughtworm has made it into quite a number of public and university libraries over the years, I never thought it would end up in the Library of Congress. Pretty cool.

solid space – a darkness in my soul

 

[Remastered for vinyl release 35 years later]

prelude to nothing (let there be light)

Go to a strange place to take a long test. Everything is unfamiliar but signals an escape. Recall the repellent damp stench of the locker room. Trees waving from the roadside. Airing tires at the gas station. Old men clean the windshields, their starched white coveralls blistered in full noon sun. Now the strange sounds of Fiat Lux wash over the bed. Now a breeze enters the room. On the phone a voice to capture an ache. A head still full of numbers. Names to speak in a rush. Understand little / experience less / imagine all instead. Growing wake of books trails behind. Later too late. Later written to the page. Later loss of lettersloss of historyloss of self. Self walks awaynever in pursuit. Transport black bile across state lines. But no: too soon. Return, retrace. Head strikes blacktop, skin inflames summers. Cover with this overcoat before a surge at year’s end. Holy songs and rituals halo material desires. Now far offnow beyondnow tinny at the end of this dead line.

[w. 2015 / rev. 2017-2019]

our younger, sharper scythes

An unending quilt of rounded clouds sewed itself through the sky, thus establishing a ceiling to the fear. The fear yawned in silent fury as the sun turned its yellow back on us and sank. Now here we were arrested in our development. Now there we are fleeing from the dissipated shadows of our better selves. Treading the same trails carved by our younger, sharper scythes through the afternoon’s tall grass. O, how our mind’s eye roves, restless in its intention to better its station someday in the vague mist drifting across the field ahead. Notwithstanding this intention the inky puddle of fear creeps forward in the absence of light. O, how many times has the sun abandoned us. O, why bother continuing to take it personally. Will it one day never return, will we one day form coherent shapes out of the approaching mist. Will we ever refuse the pound’s worth of worry dispensed by our deranged psyches across the grey counters of our frontal lobes. How gently now we accept it, how close we hold it to our fractured frames.

lungfish – hallucinatorium

 

My wife has a head of smoke
My wife has a leg of flame
My wife has a hand of bone
My wife has a silent name
My husband walks upon the walls
My husband is ten miles tall
My husband is the atmosphere
My husband is a living prayer
My daughter sleeps up in the trees
My daughter is a complex creed
My daughter keeps a shaft of light
My daughter moves in degrees of might
My son has invisible eyes
My son laughs as though he cries
My son maintains a perpetual stride
My son wanders in dreams at night

My sister waits behind the moon
My sister binds her mind in books
My sister’s voice must crush the sun
My sister snaps the shepherd’s crook
My brother’s face is a hexagon
My brother revolves at increasing speed
My brother heals as he harms
My brother decries what he has decreed
My mother excretes a reality
My mother puts her torch to sleep
My mother spreads her ribcage wide
To guide the trumpet blast inside
My father is my mother’s bride
My father resides in rocks and stones
My father has fins and wings and claws
My father is my husband’s throne.

Fun fact about this song: It was originally recorded as an instrumental, but Dan Higgs decided he wanted to add vocals. Problem was the song as recorded was too short for what he had to say, so producer Ian MacKaye suggested slowing down the tape near the end to provide enough time for Higgs to fit in all the lyrics. So that is why the song sounds all trippy near the end.

weighing souls with sand: a response

Touched through by a white wing she stands defiant (or is it expectant) above the crashing waves. Orange storm sky rages above the rocky coastline. Thundering in her ears. Birds soar overheadtheir frantic cries pierce the heavy air. I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to leave. The darkening sky. The diminishing hour. A throat clogged with fear. The golden orb sinks toward a depthless chasm, loss radiating from its rim. There is only heavy sand belowsand to weigh a soul down. Perched on the rock, though, perhaps she will ascend, the feathers of the wing lessening her load, her arms open and her soul rough with sand, aching to be brushed clean.

the agent by russell edson

. . . Assigned to you when your flesh was separating from your
mother’s, this shadow, who seeing the opportunity at hand, joined your
presence in such a way as some say the soul is given.

You have always caricatured me in my travels. I have seen you on
mountains, and in dim cafes. I have seen you hold your head, your elbows
on your knees, and while I was sad you were serene!

I seek a mastery over fate, of which you are, in objective witness, the
agent of . . . I run away one night as you sleep, the trusting wife, whose
borders have opened in the universal dark.

She feels in the morning among the sheets for the easy habit of her
husband’s shape – Now arc the earth, sweet dark, the law of umbra give
you panic to search me out with your cunning speed of light!

~from The Clam Theater (1973)

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